The Last Run (5 page)

He left the boxes out on the stoop and stepped inside.

“Want a drink?”

“What you got?”

“Popov.”

The man named Gino poured out two shots and they downed them. The door rattled open.

“Hey, Mike,” Gino muttered.

The man who had just entered grumbled, “Hey, yourself. Got a cigarette?”

“Nope. Just pinched this one from Dick.”

“Who’s this?”

“Coastie Bob,” Gino said.

“Coastie?”

“That’s right. Bob, here, was even an officer once. Now he wants to be a fisherman.”

“Really?”

“Ask him.”

This second man was early forties, Bob Doyle thought, about six feet in height and wiry, like a scarecrow made of cables. He wore sweats, shin-high rubber boots, a powder blue, checkered shirt and sweatpants that appeared not to have seen the inside of a washing machine in weeks. Rubber bands held his wild, greasy mane together in a ponytail that flopped halfway down his back. He had a scar across the bridge of his nose, brown, broken teeth and a mouth that sliced downward at the corners as though he had just frowned, or was about to. But his mouth told very little about him. His eyes were what you needed to watch. They were blue as a glacier and fierce as the eyes on a junkyard dog.

Gino said, “This here’s Mike DeCapua.”

“Hi, my name’s Bob.”

The man considered Bob Doyle’s outstretched hand without any haste. “Coast Guard, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“Fucking worthless.”

Bob Doyle smiled and said, “Okay.”

The man named Mike DeCapua was still sizing him up, as he did with all newcomers. His eyes probed Bob Doyle impersonally. “So you want to be a fisherman, eh?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“Well, there aren’t many good ones left out there.”

“No?”

“No.” He motioned with his head over Bob Doyle’s shoulder. “See that guy in there? That’s Dirty Dick.
That’s
a fucking fisherman.” He called out, “Hey, Dick! How about giving me a hit of that vodka, there?”

A logger in Maine before coming out to Sitka in the thirties, Dick had fished in the days before quotas, regulations. On one two-day trip he pulled eighty thousand pounds of halibut in a gale and then spent the next thirty-six hours filleting it. He once drank a quart of whiskey a day, until he suffered the first of five strokes. He wore plaid shirts, jeans and Rockport slip-ons. (His second stroke made it hard for him to tie laces.) He hated taking showers. Once a week Georgia would come looking for him.
You’re taking a shower now, Dick. Either that or you’re out in the street.
He slept wearing his olive green cap, and only when he removed it to scratch his bare scalp would one see a few locks of gray hair, like wildflowers clinging to life on a bare rock. Like most of the hard-core fishermen, he had monstrous hands and great, hidden strength, and wore the same blue plaid shirt and jeans day in and day out. He would hide cans of Rainier in the sofa, even sleep with them, to keep the others from stealing his beer. It did no good. Every morning he would rant and rave that someone had swiped his stash.

“So,” DeCapua said, “how long you staying?”

“I don’t know.”

“Cigarette?”

“No, thanks.”

“I mean, can I get one of yours?”

“Oh,” Bob Doyle said. “Sorry.”

Mike DeCapua tucked a Lucky between his lips, lit it and blew a lazy, contemptuous puff of smoke.

“So where’s your stuff?”

“In a couple of boxes outside.”

“That’s it?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Hmm. Want another shot?”

“Why not?”

They killed the rest of that Popov bottle with Dirty Dick and broke the seal on another. Once DeCapua had finished his Lucky he fished a wad of tobacco out of his pocket and started rolling his own cigarettes. He also started spinning yarns. Like how he had become fluent in sign language — a necessity, since both his parents were deaf—and the first time he ran away from home at thirteen and hitched his way from Hartford to Galveston. He told them tales of his life as a train hobo, crisscrossing the country inside the boxcars of freight trains, and how he’d married three times, the last time to a ditty bitch he’d met in a motel room in Bellingham, Single-Cell Susie. Old Single-Cell had black hair that looked dipped in starch, vacant eyes, a body kept nice and trim by hepatitis C, the morals of a vacuum cleaner and an insatiable appetite for crack. In the end she bolted with a buddy of his, another fisherman, while DeCapua was sitting in a cell at Lemon Creek doing twenty-two months for breaking into the Pilothouse bar and grill down near Old Thompsen Harbor. Hadn’t he heard about his Pilothouse caper? No? By God, he sure cleaned that safe —$2,346.25 in all, half of it in rolled quarters. With the money, he and Single-Cell got a room at the Cascade Inn out on Halibut Point Road. The very next night they went right back to the Pilothouse and got shitfaced on tequila, buying rounds for the house with the rolled quarters until closing. He’d even bought beers for the owner, Ron Bellows, a paraplegic from Florida who seemed like a thoroughly good guy until he prosecuted. The cops found DeCapua at the Cascade two days later, passed out in bed with Single-Cell, beer bottles and $658.75 in bills and quarters scattered all over the room. Bob Doyle just kept nodding his head and filling DeCapua’s glass. The man was quite a talker, all right, but he evidently knew his fishing and seemed to have led quite a life.

T
he tale that Mike DeCapua told with particular relish was the story of his Idaho jailbreak and flight to Alaska in the spring of 1983. At the time he’d been making a living as a burglar —not a good living, to be honest, but at least nobody could say he was a thief without resolve. The sheriff of Latah County knew him well. Twice his deputies nabbed him in the act: on November 25, 1979, at the Log Inn, a dance hall in the town of Potlatch, and again, two years later, inside the Les Schwab Tire Commercial outlet in Moscow, the county seat. The first time DeCapua pleaded no contest to attempted burglary and got seven and a half years probation. For his second caper he received three years at the state correctional facility in Boise.

When he came up for parole, the judge asked him a series of questions that he answered with a series of promises. He promised to quit the booze. He promised to quit the smack. He promised to quit ducking his child-support. He promised to quit hitting taverns, titty bars, bowling alleys, motels and pawnshops. For good measure, he promised to read the Bible at night, to attend church on Sundays (he was technically a Catholic, though his parents had never bothered to have him baptized), to apply to seminary —in short, to become a foot soldier for Jesus. The judge, mildly impressed, not only let him out of the joint but allowed him to move across the state line to the city of Spokane. There, DeCapua got a bed at a halfway house, a job as a janitor at a Holiday Inn West and a parole officer to keep him company.

For two months DeCapua kept his PO thinking nice thoughts. Then came the afternoon he left work early and ran into some biker pals. Against his better judgment, he allowed them to talk him into splitting a pitcher of beer, and the next thing he knew he was waking up on the floor of a warehouse, lights shining in his bloodshot eyes. The bright lights, it turned out, were coming from flashlights —flashlights held by two Spokane County deputy sheriffs. The cops interrogated him for hours. There had been a rash of burglaries in the area and they thought, mistakenly, that they had their perp. But since they could elicit from him no more than a belch — and a weak one at that—they ran his prints and photo through the computer and waited.

An hour later, in stomped the sheriff. He was a pot roast of a character, round, gristly and not at all amused looking. He slammed a folder on the table. “We know who you are,” he said, and then declared rather grandly, “Mark Allen Rhodes.” Actually, the sheriff was not far off; Rhodes was one of DeCapua’s aliases. There was a notation to that effect on his Idaho rap sheet. But the Spokane Sheriff’s Department hadn’t connected the dots. Mark Allen Rhodes was, to their understanding, a local resident with an unblemished record.

Not one to pass up a chance to confound authority, DeCapua lifted his head, made puppy eyes at the sheriff and muttered, in the most ashamed tone of voice he could muster: “Okay, you got me. Gee, in a way I’m glad that you found me out. Now, sir, could I get a cigarette?”

At the arraignment the next morning the public defender stood before the judge and argued that his client, because of his clean record, should be released on his own recognizance until the trial date.

His lawyer motioned for DeCapua to stand before the judge.

“Mr. Rhodes, do you have a job?”

“Yup.”

“Do you have an address?”

“Sure do.”

“How long have you been living in the city of Spokane?”

“Uh, nine years.”

“Your Honor,” his lawyer said, “Mr. Rhodes has a residence and a full-time place of employment. And he has lived in Spokane since 1974. Considering how tight space is at the county jail, I would ask the court to consider releasing him.”

The judge regarded the gaunt, young man with the long ponytail and frayed coveralls. If he had shaved, he needed another razor.

“Very well,” the judge said.

Within a couple of hours, DeCapua was standing on the highway outside of town, a Greyhound ticket to Seattle in one pocket and in the other a wad of bills —mostly fives and singles —fifty bucks he’d bummed off his girlfriend. He also had a lighter, a fresh pack of Marlboros, a bag of weed and rolling papers.

By no means was this his
Great Escape
and the hounds were hardly on his heels, but Mike DeCapua was taking no chances. He was twenty-seven, and on his way to the Great Land.

Life on America’s last frontier, he quickly learned, wasn’t all greatness. The rest of that spring Mike DeCapua spent scraping cod guts out of the holds of longliners. When he got sick of that, he moved to Juneau and got a job installing drain tile in bathrooms. When he got sick of that, he found work flame-broiling steaks at the Black Angus.

It rained month in and month out. There were few taverns and even fewer tire dealerships to hit in a pinch. Pot was expensive. Beer was no buy —cheap brew went for four dollars a mug, six in the strip clubs. And there weren’t many tits in Alaska beyond those on display in the titty bars.

He also had to part with a number of cherished myths about frontier living. His second summer in Juneau he made his first solo foray into the wilderness, a two-week trip. Into a twelve-foot canoe he packed a fishing pole, a crab trap, a .4470 Winchester live action, a .45 automatic, oatmeal, flour, coffee, tobacco, beans, salt and baking powder —for his smelly feet. Finally he bought something he’d always wanted: a tepee. It took him nine hours to put up, nearly five to take down. After that, Mike DeCapua went back to pup tents. He had to give it to white America on that one. Pup tents had a practical upside.

Of course, there were other upsides. He liked watching eagles dive on old bait the hand trollers dumped in the channel after a trip. He liked catching a halibut and selling it for a hundred and forty dollars. He liked the fact that during his first three months in Alaska no one had asked him to sign anything. He liked that people could tote a gun without drawing a second glance. And he especially liked that everyone he met hated the government.

Surrounded by the raw material of life, Mike DeCapua nonetheless found it difficult to remake himself. Like an athlete breaking training, he resumed partying and went about screwing as many Native women as he could impress with his tales as a mountain man. During one interval he did date a redhead, Raye, and even moved in with her and her daughter. But one morning after a minor spat he simply packed a duffel bag and walked to the police headquarters in downtown Juneau. He told the officers he wanted to turn himself in for transgressions in Idaho. When they did not take him seriously, he told them to call the Latah County courthouse. They did, and were connected to a judge named Schwam.

The judge was succinct.

“If he doesn’t like the snow in Alaska and feels like turning himself in, tell him to come down here and do it.” The judge paused. “He got up there on his own dime. He’s not coming back on mine.”

So he stayed. First he moved in with four other Lower Forty-eight castaways who lived on Eaton Street in a trailer, which they called the Den of Doom. It was a den of drunks, actually, a mecca for displaced souls without a bed or a boat for the night. Their beer, acid and coke parties raised eyebrows, especially those of the pastor of the local Assemblies of God church, which shared their driveway. On Sunday mornings after the church doors opened, an entourage of loggers, miners and fishermen descended on the place, each with a bottle of cheap whiskey, gin or vodka under one arm and a case of Miller or Bud on their heads for another NFL Sunday.

After football season ended, a foreigner came to stay a few nights. He was a little man, kind of dark, kind of hairy, with clothes that always reeked of pipe tobacco. Birol, he called himself. The man was from somewhere in Turkey, and wanted very much to stay in the United States. He was even willing to pay for an American wife.

“Buddy,” DeCapua told him, “for ten grand I’ll get you the woman of your dreams.”

The dream lady was an old girlfriend of his from Spokane, the one he’d left behind when he bolted to Alaska. Robin Germen was her name. He remembered her as being either nineteen or twenty, with a neat, waifish little body, disheveled wisps of floating brown hair and a head full of fluffy dreams. One of those dreams was to go to Alaska. Then he remembered she had two kids.

Well, he thought. Nobody’s perfect.

He hadn’t called the girl in two years and had lost her number, but remembered her mother lived in Eugene, Oregon. He left his phone number, and not long afterward, Robin called him back. It took some doing, but he finally convinced her that he really did miss her, after which he sent her and the kids one-way plane tickets to Juneau.

He greeted them at the airport, put them in a cab and took them straight back to the Den of Doom. She had barely put down her luggage when DeCapua asked, “Say, would you marry a Turk?”